Bob Kaylor

A Pleasing Sacrifice - Lessons from Leviticus

What kinds of rituals do you have at your house? What kinds of routines help life make sense for you?

Truth is that our whole lives are full of ritual and I think it’s because there’s an inherent human need to connect the material and the spiritual. It seems to be built into our DNA. Archaeological evidence suggests that the earliest humans engaged in rituals even before there was such a thing as real language. The rituals were, in some sense, their language—they provided a natural order to life.

Now, we like to think that with all of our technologies and advancements that ritual and mysterious connections between the material and spiritual are a thing of the past. Yet, I was talking to someone the other day who said, “Well, I haven’t been sick yet this year” who then actually walked away from me to knock on some nearby wood. I was connecting with some old friends back in Pennsylvania over the New Year’s weekend and discovered that all of us had planned to have sauerkraut on New Year’s Day—an old Pennsylvania Dutch tradition that’s supposed to bring good luck (my mom would MAKE us eat it every year). Then I’m watching the Super Bowl and the Steelers are about to give up a touchdown toward the end of the first half when there’s a timeout. I go to the bathroom during the commercial break and when I come back, on the next play, James Harrison intercepts the ball and runs 100 yards for a touchdown. So, in the fourth quarter, right after the Cardinals scored to go ahead, what did I do? I went to the bathroom because, well, good things apparently happen in this game for the Steelers when I do! And, of course, Big Ben drove them down the field in two minutes and they won. Coincidence? I think not!

Admittedly, that’s not terribly rational and I don’t really believe it was the reason the Steelers won…mostly. We all have these little quirks and things we pay attention to that nobody else might notice. When it’s individualized, we might call that superstition. But what about those rituals that are common to a whole community? Think, for example, of the kinds of rituals we engage in as Americans – we put our hands over our hearts for the Pledge of Allegiance, we play the national anthem at sports events, we shoot fireworks on the 4th of July—all of these rituals remind us that we’re part of something larger than ourselves. We have them in church as well—the changing of the paraments, serving communion, our order of worship—all are rituals and routines that have been practiced for centuries without much change. It’s these rituals that connect the past and present and connect the common to the divine.

When you read Leviticus, it’s easy to get the idea that this is just a long, long, boring list of such rituals gone terribly amok. Some of it seems like superstition or, even more troubling, that God is arbitrarily turning the screws on people, getting them so focused on ritual that they can’t do anything else. As I said last Sunday, if you can get through these two weeks in Leviticus and still enjoy reading the Bible, you’ll be home free! Preachers tend to avoid this book and the lectionary only has it come up occasionally. After all, we’ve moved past this way of living and thinking about the world and about God, right?

Well, not so fast. I want to make the case with you this morning that there’s something absolutely essential in these texts that we need to understand before we go any further in our reading of the Bible. It all has to do with holiness.

To this point in our reading of the Bible we’ve been tracking the relationship between God and humanity—a covenant relationship begun at creation, tested in the waters of the flood, realized in the close relationship between God and Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and now, in the time of Moses, worked out in a whole community of people. God has called this people called Israel, has entered into relationship with them there in the sands of the Sinai desert, and now begins to form the community around a particular identity that is marked by their unique worship and practice.

We read the commandments last week and one thing that should be clear by now is that this God, the God of Israel, the Creator God, is not contiguous with his creation like the pagan gods of Egypt or Canaan. This God is separate, one, complete, and wholly other-than the rest of his creation. That’s what the Bible generally means when it uses the word “holy” in reference to God. Holiness is that sense of being set apart, pure, purposeful. To say that God is holy is to say that God is not on the same plane as we are—God is sovereign over all things.

You notice how this holiness of God gets played out in Exodus. When the Israelites come to Mt. Sinai to receive the commandments, God tells Moses to keep the people back from the mountain—that there’s a barrier between them and being able to see God. One cannot see the face of God and live. Moses comes back from his encounter with God with his face shining so bright that he has to wear a veil. There is a distinct difference between humans and God.

I think one of the reasons we struggle with these texts has to do with the fact that we have, in some sense, domesticated God. There’s plenty of God talk in our culture. People are writing books about God all the time, going on talk shows, coming up with their own ideas. People want to talk about God, but they want to do so on their own terms. I find it interesting when I meet people for the first time and they find out what I do for my vocation that one of the first things they’ll say is, “Well, I’m not religious, I’m spiritual.” What I generally understand that to mean is that they don’t want to be bothered with the idea of God on God’s own terms but would rather make up an idea of God that fits their own paradigm. If I say I’m “spiritual,” then I can have any god that I want or none at all.

But that’s not the kind of God that is revealed in the Bible. This God is one, is specific, is personal, is holy, and demands a response. Humanity does not come at a relationship with God as an equal. God is God and we are not. Coming to terms with that reality is a big part of what’s going on here in Leviticus.

God is holy, and because God is holy he calls his chosen people to a standard of holiness as well. Perhaps the most pivotal verse in all of Leviticus is in chapter 19 (which is in next week’s readings, but I mention it today because it’s so important to the whole) – “Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (19:1-2).

God has established a covenant relationship with this people and now God defines the purpose of that relationship—holiness. They are to be set apart for God’s purposes, to be the people through whom God was going to redeem the whole world. They had been chosen, marked, given a mission—God’s own mission—and the rituals and symbols they are given in Leviticus and elsewhere are designed to keep them focused on that larger purpose.

I’ve said it in nearly every sermon in this series and I’ll say it again—one of the keys to reading the Bible is to suspend, at least initially, our 21st century worldview. We tend to compartmentalize our lives into the sacred and the secular, for example. Church is church and the rest of the week is ours—the symbols and practices are somewhat detached from one another. We “go to” church and worship God as a separate activity. But to the Israelites every thing they did was an act of worship—from eating, to personal hygiene, to farming, to work, to leisure time—all of it was part of the worship of God. Their theology was not a simple intellectual head trip, but was lived out in every activity of every day. What you eat, how you bring sacrifices, what you wear, how you deal with your neighbor, how you run your business—all of life is subject to a standard of holiness. They were a distinctive people not just because of what they believed but because of what they did. These laws and rituals marked them as a people distinct, set apart unto God.

In Leviticus we see holiness played out in at least three different ways:

The first is holy space. The Tabernacle was the place where the Ark of the Covenant was kept—a holy object in a holy space. The Ark represented the presence of God and was kept in the Holy of Holies where only the High Priest could go once a year on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur). The Tabernacle was the place where sacrifices were made on behalf of the people and was the center of worship life. As Terence Fretheim says in his commentary on Exodus, “God chooses a place because God has entered into history with a people for whom place is important.”

The holy space of the Tabernacle and, later, the Temple, represented God’s dwelling place among his people. The Temple would later be called the “navel of the earth”—the center point of everything. By establishing holy space, God was giving the Israelites an object lesson in holiness—that there are some things that are set aside for God’s purposes.

Holy space is still important. We believe that God is everywhere, of course, but that there’s something vital that happens when God’s people are gathered together in a space set aside for worship. The rituals that we do here are simple, but they do point to a larger reality. When we come into this space, we do so as a symbol of our coming into the presence of God. Humans need a sense of belonging to place and God provides us with holy space as a reminder that God does, indeed, dwell among us.

Along with holy space is the concept of holy time. You’ll note the number of festival, feasts, and fasts in Leviticus. These are all designed to embed the story of God into the DNA of the whole community.

I just got my next shipment of books for my doctoral program this week and one of them is titled The Drama of Scripture by Craig Bartholomew and Michael Goheen. I love what they have to say about the Israelites and holy time. “Each week Israel keeps the Sabbath day as a reminder of what life is really all about. And the Israelite year is punctuated by regular festivals during which Israel pauses before God to remember and to celebrate…God gives all these rituals to the Israelites as a means of grace to regularly recenter their lives in him and all that he has done for them.”

We have “holidays,” but sometimes we fail to remember that the word is a derivative of “Holy Days.” Giving time to God is essential to holiness. Keeping a regular Sabbath for worship, giving daily time to God, celebrating the great feasts and fasts like Lent (which begins this week) are all designed to draw us closer in our relationship with God and to help us recognize and respond to the mission we are called toward.

And there is also holy practice. The sacrifices in Leviticus are tedious, bloody and, in some sense, very troubling. We’re not used to reading such detail about blood. After all, most of us never see where our meat comes from—it’s already packaged and sanitized by the time we see it. But for ancient people, animals and produce were the life blood of their lives—the basis of their economy and thus their spiritual lives as well.

The Israelites believed that the barrier between them and God was their own sin. A holy God cannot coexist with unholiness, thus there had to be a means by which the relationship between God and humanity could be mended. For the Israelites, it was blood—the very source of life in their understanding. In the sacrifice for sin, the sinner would put his hand on the head of the animal and transfer his sin to it, then offer it to God. It’s very primitive, but it’s also highly symbolic. It’s a sign that sin a serious business—that it requires extreme measures to heal, that it costs us something when we violate our relationship with God. The people offered sacrifices to God not so much for God’s benefit, but for theirs—a powerful and costly reminder that sin has deathly consequences.

The coming of Jesus would change this whole concept. In Jesus God would deal with the sin of humanity once and for all not by receiving sacrifices, but by offering his own life on the cross. Now, in this holy space, we don’t offer burnt offerings and sacrifices for our sin, but we receive God’s offering of Christ for us in the sacrament of holy communion. Our sin has deathly consequences—and Christ has paid them. When we share together in the bread and cup, we are undertaking a holy practice in a holy space—remembering our sin and remembering and embracing God’s grace.

Holy space, holy time, holy practice. We need all three. No, we don’t need to know all the details of Leviticus, which are meant for a particular time and place in the evolution of a particular people. But we do need to recognize that God desires to set us aside for holiness.

It’s not just our rituals that do that, though. Leviticus also tells us that evidence of holiness is found in how we live in community with each other and with the world around us. Much of the material in the latter part of Leviticus includes specific instructions about living together in a community. There’s an instruction about harvest, where the landowner is told not to glean the fields and vineyard bare, but to leave the gleanings for the poor. Another instruction forbids stealing and lying. Yet another warns against taking advantage of people who are deaf or blind. Justice is to be administered impartially. People should not slander one another, nor seek vengeance against one another. God then sums up all of those instructions with the command, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus would later appropriate all these ideas into his own preaching. In Matthew 5:48, for example, in the midst of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is speaking on love for one’s enemies and then says, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” It’s a direct connection to Leviticus—the idea that holiness or perfection has something to do with our actions. As God acts to save and care for his people, so must we care for others, even those who may not like us. This is how we are to be set apart from the rest of the world—that the followers of Christ will be seen as anomalies of grace in a world of revenge and self-gratification. As the old campfire song goes, “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.”

Truth is, though, that too often we’ve been known as Christians by other less than holy things—hypocrisy, greed, empty rituals. The Scriptures constantly remind us that we must work at holiness in our worship and in our work.

It’s that integration of worship and work that I hope you’ll see as you read through Leviticus. Interestingly, the Greek word for worship is “liturgia” which means “work of the people.” When we worship, we are at work giving glory to God. When we are at work, we worship God through actions that lead to holiness.

Let us work to be holy as God is holy!

Written in Stone - Exodus 13-30

Written in Stone
Exodus 20:1-17

We begin this morning with a little quiz. For this you’ll need a pen and your notes page from the bulletin. This is going to happen fast so listen up. You’ll have 30 seconds to answer the first three questions and one minute to answer the fourth. Ready?

Question 1 – What are the ingredients in a Big Mac?
Question 2 – Name all seven dwarves.
Question 3 – Name all the members of the Brady Bunch family.
Question 4 - Name all Ten Commandments

How did you do? Did you get all the commandments? In order? If not, you’re clearly not alone.

In 2007, Kelton Research polled 1,000 people on their recall of Big Mac ingredients vs. Commandments. It appears that Ronald is keeping Moses in bondage.

Eighty percent of Americans knew the Big Mac had two all-beef patties while just over 50 percent knew “Thou shalt not kill” was a commandment. Only 14 percent knew all 10.

Even those who attend church or synagogue at least once a week have a bit of trouble naming them all. The top two mentioned commandments — Thou shalt not kill and Thou shalt not steal — were recalled by 70 percent and 69 percent respectively. The Big Mac was more memorable — 79 percent knew of its all-beef patties and 76 percent knew it came with lettuce.

Hyper-religious people tend get all bent out of shape if the Ten Commandments are pulled off courtroom walls, but they aren’t able to pull up the Decalogue themselves.

Sharply captured by one news-post, “It’s enough to make McMoses throw his two all-beef tablets to the ground!”

This morning I want to walk you through why the commandments are a foundational part of understanding the Bible and, even more so, understanding our relationship with God and with others in community. We fill our mental hard drives with all kinds of trivia, but the Scriptures want us to realize right away that these commandments or “decalogue” (from the Greek “deca” – ten and “logos” – word) are anything but trivial. They are God’s first word to Israel and are important enough to be written in stone.

But before we dive in to the commandments themselves we need to review what brings the Israelites to this point in their history at the foot of Mt. Sinai. Last week, we talked about Moses and the story of the escape of God’s people from slavery in Egypt. We noted that the narrative has shifted significantly—that in Genesis, God made a covenant with particular individuals—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—which was promise of blessing, land, and numerous descendants. Two weeks ago we talked about Jacob, who received the name “Israel” after his wrestling match with God at the Jabbok River. Now, Jacob’s descendants lived in Egypt, some 400 years after he had taken them there to escape famine in the land of Canaan. Moses was called to liberate the people and God demonstrates his superiority over the gods of the Egyptians through the plagues. The Hebrews are told by God through Moses to prepare themselves to leave and are given a sacred rite through which to remember that night—the Passover. From then on, the covenant of God would be with Israel the nation—a community of faith and family.

We see that community struggle in these early chapters of Exodus. Even after their miraculous escape from the Egyptian Army through the miracle at the Red Sea (or Reed Sea), and after God himself has led them in a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire, the community is conflicted. They want freedom, but they also want security and comfort. They complain about the lack of food and water. Some want to go back to Egypt where they had plenty to eat. It’s selective memory—we tend to only want to remember “the good old days” without the bad stuff.

But God provides for the people in the form of manna and quail. Moses learns how to be a leader with the advice of his father-in-law Jethro (these are great verses to think about if you are a leader). But now, having moved out into the desert to the foot of Mt. Sinai (the same mountain where Moses first saw that burning bush), God takes the opportunity to expand the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to the whole community.

Just an aside here, but I like to think of the evolution of this covenant relationship looks a lot like what happens when we’re raising children. Think about it—when your child is small, before they can speak, we teach them what to touch and what not to touch. “No” we say. Well, biblically speaking, that’s the story of Adam and Eve. God says, “Don’t touch” but they do and they get burned. We still carry the scars.

Then there’s that period of time when our children can speak but they’re still not reasonable. In fact, there are times like, say, in the grocery store when they’re foaming at the mouth because you won’t buy Cocoa Puffs, spinning around the floor, screaming at the top of their little lungs. It’s at that point that you think to yourself—“I could just leave right now, or stick the child in the milk cooler and forget about him. But you don’t…because you love them. That’s the Noah story—God says, “No matter what, I won’t leave you…even when you act like a hyena. That’s what this rainbow means.”

As a child gets older, they learn more by doing…by following and imitating you. They want to be with you, to know you and so you show them things and give them an idea of their potential. That’s how God deals with Abraham—more like a friend. He promises Abraham that he’ll be the father of a great nation—a covenant of potentiality.

But then the child goes to school, say kindergarten. Now the child is no longer just an autonomous individual. Now he or she must live in a particular community that has particular boundaries and expectations. Now the rules get posted on the wall for all to read and heed. A child who follows the rules learns that they are not the center of the universe—that there are others whom we are to respect and care for. Fail to follow those rules and there is a predictable amount of chaos.

Think of the Ten Commandments as kind of like a theological kindergarten. These are God’s rules for this newly formed community—rules that are designed to promote health and respect, rules that define who the community is and our responsibilities within it. They are rules designed not to dampen our lives, but to enhance them and make them whole. Follow these rules and we can live in community with God and each other. Follow them not and chaos is the natural result.

I think the reason a lot of people don’t connect to the commandments is because they kind of think of them as something like the IRS tax code (which is what the rest of this section of scripture sounds like—lots of other rules and regulations. Next week you’ll be reading in Leviticus, which is all about rules. I told a class last week if we get through Leviticus in this sermon series and everyone is still reading we’ll be home free!).

I hate doing my taxes… talking about taxes. I don’t understand taxes and what I do understand I don’t like. I look for loopholes. I’d rather play around on Facebook than fill in my social security number for the umpteenth time. But you gotta do your taxes. You run into a major problem if you don’t (unless, of course, you are a political appointee—then you just say, “Whoops!”).

The commandments, though, are not designed this way. In a very real sense, the commandments are one of the ways God speaks to us and leads us. I brought up last week the question that many people ask—“Why doesn’t God speak to us the way he did to people in the Old Testament?” Well, here is the word, written for us as a kind of love letter, a set of relationship rules—albeit a love letter written in stone.

There’s a great book by author Chris Hedges about the commandments in modern context called Losing Moses on the Freeway: The Ten Commandments in America. In that book he travels around the US looking at how the commandments affect the lives of people—great read (I’ll post a link on the blog). But in the prologue to the book he writes a great definition of what the commandments are about:

“The commandments do not protect us from evil. They protect us from committing evil. The commandments are designed to check our darker impulses, warning us that pandering to impulses can have terrible consequences. ‘If you would enter life,’ the Gospel of Matthew reads, ‘keep the commandments (19:17).’ The commandments hold community together. It is community that gives our lives, even in pain and grief, a healing solidarity. It is fealty to community that frees us from the dictates of our idols, idols that promise us fulfillment through the destructive impulses of constant self-gratification. The commandments call us to reject and defy powerful forces that can rule our lives and to live instead for others, even if this costs us status and prestige and wealth. The commandments show us how to avoid being enslaved, how to save us from ourselves. They lead us to love, the essence of life.”

Now, I’d modify Hedges’ statement a bit and say that it is a relationship with God that saves us from ourselves, and the community ethics of God that save us from each other. These are contained in the commandments.

Turn to Exodus 20 and lets look at these commandments. When you do so, one of the first things you’ll notice is that their really divided into two parts. The first four commandments are about the God-human relationship and the last six are about conduct within the community. The first section is about worship—about the vertical relationship we are to have with God, and the section section is about horizontal relationships we are to have with each other. Even at this early stage, we begin to see the shape of the cross!

The first section deals with God—and the first commandment is paramount. You shall have no other gods before me. Wait, you say, there aren’t any other gods, right? Well, not in the spiritual sense but certainly in the practical sense. Those will be addressed in rule #2. But here, right out of the gate God says, “I need your full and undivided attention if this is going to work.” Worship, then, is not an option. It’s not that God needs to have his ego stroked on a daily or weekly basis, but that worship turns our full attention to him—the one who loves and cares for us all.

Number two – don’t make any graven images and worship them. In other words, don’t worship the creature over the creator. Says Hedges, “We are burdened by household gods, no longer made of clay, but all promising to fulfill us. Our computer, our television, our job, our wealth, our social status, along with the brands we wear and the cars we drive, promise us contentment in the form of identity. These household gods seem to offer well-being, health, and success. But all these gods create cults. And all these cults circle back to us, to a dangerous self-worship fed by forces who seek to ensnare us in idolatry.” Worship of God, in other words, precludes worship of anyone or anything else.

Number 3 – don’t misuse God’s name. Now, here’s an interesting thing about this commandment. This isn’t just about swearing using God’s name (the traditional interpretation). What this commandment is really about is misappropriating God’s name to things that are outside of God’s purpose. In the ancient world, pagan peoples invoked the names of their gods in an attempt to get what they wanted. Not so with the God of Israel, whose name “I AM WHO I AM” could not be used in that way. We cannot make God’s name a means to an end. Throughout history—from battlefields to ballfields—people have used God’s name to promote their own conquests. God will have none of that.

Number 4 – Remember the Sabbath. Here’s a classic example of how God gives the commandments FOR us. The Sabbath rest was designed as a time of disengagement from the toil of everyday labor in order to commune with God and each other. The Sabbath is prescribed time, in other words, to work on our relationships. Sabbath means we stop our frantic lives and listen for God. Sabbath helps us know our limits.

That’s the first section or the first “tablet” if you will—defining our relationship with God. The next section is about us and how we deal with each other.

Number 5 – Honor your father and mother. Contextually, this was largely about maintaining the continuity of the covenant from generation to generation, about care for elderly parents, and about keeping the land in trust, which was God’s gift. In modern context, however, this commandment has a tendency to divide a room like this. Some will find it easy to honor the parents who raised them in a secure and loving home. Others  in this room have painful memories of parents who did not do much worth honoring. I like how Hedges approaches this in his book: “The commandment to honor your parents is a commandment to honor yourself, honor the life force that created you, the good and the bad mingled within us, but not to honor abuse. Those who were abused, who wince at the name of father or mother, cannot be asked to honor the memory of the abuse or the abuser. But at the same time, however painful, we have to see in parents, even bad parents, reflections of ourselves, if only to guard against and keep at bay the demons within us. We cannot wish our parents away. They will always be a major, overpowering force in our life. We cannot undo abuse, but we can find a way to honor life, even their lives, by turning that abuse into compassion, not only for ourselves, which is necessary for healing, but more important, for all who suffer” (p. 90).

Number 6 – Do not murder. Seems simple, doesn’t it? Yet, the Bible is pretty bloody as we have seen, and later on we’ll see that God is portrayed as one who orders the killing. What’s up with that? Well, we don’t have time for that today, but I promise you I’ll be dedicating a whole sermon to the violence in the Old Testament in just a few weeks. Stay tuned. This commandment seems clear—life is sacred to God—yet we seek loopholes when it comes to things like war and capital punishment. Suffice it to say, this command makes the point that all life belongs to God and cannot be taken lightly.

Number 7 – Do not commit adultery. As the New Interpreter’s Bible puts it, this commandment is a “recognition that sexuality is enormously wondrous and enormously dangerous.” When sexuality is distorted, when we use others or break the covenant of marriage for self-gratification, the whole community suffers. Our rampant divorce rate and the emotional and economic toll it takes should tell us that clearly.

Number 8 – Do not steal. This goes with the other commandments in this section when it comes to our personal responsibility. To be content with what we have, to respect the rights and persons of others, to know security and peace is essential to community. When this goes bad, trust goes out the window and we wind up being suspicious of everyone.

Number 9 – Do not give false testimony or do not lie. Truth-telling is essential to community. This commandment is primarily concerned about the courts of ancient Israel, where the truth must be told or the social fabric of the community breaks down. When we lie to others, we are using and manipulating those people for our own interest. This week we saw this in action as two prominent baseball stars—Alex Rodriguez and Miguel Tejada—were caught lying about their use of performance enhancing drugs, only coming clean about it after they were caught. Their lies affects the integrity of the game, but what about lies that are even more destructive? I’m sure you can think of examples.

Number 10 – Do not covet – don’t want what isn’t yours. This command concerns the destructive power of desire. I would argue that the violation of this commandment is largely what has gotten us into the current economic mess. When we want what isn’t ours and want it bad enough, it usually winds up affecting the whole community. Some scholars say that this tenth commandment is really related to the first—that our desire should be for God, not for things. “Seek first the Kingdom of God,” Jesus would later say, “and all these things—all the right things—will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33).

Got ‘em all? Well, it would be great if you could memorize them in order. But what I find most interesting and instructive about these commandments is what Jesus would later do with them, using the same two-tablet formula. He was asked, “What is the greatest commandment?” And he said this:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind, and all your strength.” Notice how that encompasses the first four commandments but goes even beyond them to mean that all of our being is made by God to love God and live for God. We are made for worship.

And then the second—“Love your neighbor as yourself.” Again, this goes beyond six commandments but applies to all of our interactions. Can we treat others in the way we want to be treated? Can we love them in the way we wish to be loved? That’s what it means to live in community—that it’s not all about me, but about us.

If you love me, Jesus said, you will keep my commandments. If you love me, you will show it by how you live in relationship to me and to your fellow humans.

It’s corny, but the old saying goes that if you want to truly be healthy in body, mind, and spirit—take two tablets!

They were made for us.

Sources:
Hedges, Chris. Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America. New York: Free Press/Simon and Schuster, 2005.

"Moses vs. Big Mac." Homiletics, September-October 2008.

Moses: The Education of a Leader (Exodus 1-12)

 I flew to Denver last Friday for a meeting and before leaving I picked up a copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success. I’ve enjoyed Gladwell’s other books (The Tipping Point, Blink) and found them immensely insightful (and great fodder for sermons).

In this book, Gladwell challenges our long-held assumptions about what makes a person successful. When we talk about successful people, says Gladwell, “We want to know what they’re like—what kind of personalities they have, or how intelligent they are, or what kind of lifestyles they have, or what special talents they may have been born with. And we assume that it is those personal qualities that explain how that individual reached the top…In the autobiographies published every year by the billionaire/entrepreneur/rock star/celebrity, the story line is always the same: our hero is born in modest circumstances and by virtue of his own grit and talent fights his way to greatness.”

But those assumptions are wrong, according to Gladwell. In fact, he says, “People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.”

I find Gladwell’s thesis intriguing on a lot of levels. Could it be, for example, that timing is as important as talent when it comes to success? And think about the old question when it comes to successful leaders: Are they born or made? The truth is that they’re both. Great leaders are the result of an intersection of timing, talent, and we might say “tenacity.” But they are also the product of a community of people who helped them along the way. No one truly makes it on their own.

I was reading Gladwell at the same time I was reading the Moses story, which gave me a kind of exegetical laboratory to test Gladwell’s theory. Moses is the towering figure in Judaism—referred to many more times throughout the Bible than Abraham and Isaac and Jacob combined. It is his story and the story of the people of Israel leaving slavery in Egypt and going to the promised land that is the foundational narrative of the rest of Scripture.

What’s interesting, though, is that the Bible doesn’t portray Moses as a superhero—in fact, he is quite the opposite. He’s fearful, skittish. He stutters. He makes excuses. He is impulsive. He is reluctant. He doesn’t seem to have any innate talent or ability to lead anyone. On top of that, he is a murderer. So, how does he become successful? And, perhaps more importantly for our purposes, why does God call him? Gladwell would argue that while Moses had liabilities he also had advantages—but also that he was in the right place at the right time to hear and respond to the call of God.

The story opens with the people of Israel in slavery—Israel is now the name of a whole people, not just an individual, which is a fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham. They are set to building some of the border cities in Egypt—Pithom and Rameses (not the pyramids, which were built centuries before). The Egyptians suppressed these Hebrew people but they continued to multiply, causing the Pharaoh to become paranoid that they might eventually revolt. So, he orders the male Hebrew babies to be killed by the midwives. Two of the midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, realize that Pharaoh is a few bricks shy of a pyramid and defy the order, blaming their failure to do the nasty work on the “vigorous” constitution of the Hebrew women, who give birth before the midwives can get there. Moses’ birth is thus made possible because some women who don’t even know him decide to honor God instead of human power and paranoia.

Moses is thus spared and put in an advantageous position as soon as he comes out of the womb. He is preserved by the midwives, and then by his mother who hides him until he’s too old to hide anymore and then sends him down the river in a basket in order to somehow preserve his life (interestingly, the Hebrew word translated “basket” here is the same word for “ark” in the Noah story--God is preserving his people once again). His sister, Miriam, follows along and watches until an Egyptian princess plucks him out of the water and makes him her own. Before Moses is even old enough to know it, a community of people have preserved him and given him an advantage that all those other Hebrew baby boys never had because they were thrown into the river at birth.

Listen to Gladwell, “Biologists often talk about the ecology of an organism: the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit ever chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured. We all know that successful people come from hardy seeds. But do we know about the sunlight that warmed them, the soil in which they put down the roots, and the rabbits and lumberjacks they were lucky enough to avoid?”

Moses was born at precisely the right time, Gladwell would say—right at the moment when the midwives chose to disobey their orders. He avoids being cut down and is nurtured by the sacrifice of his family and the compassion of an Egyptian princess. It’s here that we see Gladwell’s thesis in action. No one really makes it on their own. From the time we’re born we are the product of our environment and the family and community we grow up in. Even if you grew up in a dysfunctional home, there is still the possibility that others outside the family can step in for you somewhere along the line and provide an exception, a hand up. Moses grows up as an adoptee in Pharaoh’s palace in an improbable reversal of fortune. Sometimes when things seem to be at their worst, someone steps up and steps in on our behalf.

This concept seems obvious, but I’m not sure we always see it that way. I did a little exercise this week when I read this book. I made a list of all the people in my life who have somehow contributed to the person I have become. It’s quite a list, full of family members, teachers, mentors. It was a humbling exercise that I’d encourage you to think about doing sometime. “No man is an island,” wrote John Donne. And that’s true. Our success depends on others.

But what we do with the abundance of nurture we receive is also a critical factor in success. If we maximize it, we tend to see more success. Gladwell calls this “The Matthew Effect” on success. It’s based, interestingly, on Matthew 25:29 – For those who have will be given more, and they will have an abundance. As for those who do not have, even what they have will be taken away from them.” The term “Matthew Effect” was originally coined by sociologist Robert Merton, who observed that it is those who are successful who are most likely to be given special opportunities that lead to further success. It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks, the best students who get the best teaching and attention, the biggest kids who get the most coaching and practice in sports, and so forth.

As an adopted son of the Pharaoh, Moses likely received the best education available at the time. He would receive all the advantages of Egyptian wealth and status. No doubt he could have remained in Pharaoh’s household and had a very different and more lucrative kind of success. But Moses also felt the pull of his Hebrew heritage—the strong connection to the people who brought him into the world. Moses had a dual advantage and thus a unique preparation as a leader. He would be able to stand in front of Pharaoh, having been educated in Egyptian ways, but he would also stand for his people.

But you notice that Moses doesn’t come to that knowledge, that success, right away. When he impulsively kills an Egyptian for beating a Hebrew slave, Moses doesn’t display the strength of character we expect in a leader, but flees terrified into the desert, escaping the wrath of Pharaoh and the scrutiny of his own people. Success seems anything but assured.

See, while Moses had the education and advantage, what he still lacked was what we might call the “discipline of the desert” or what Gladwell calls “The 10,000 Hour Rule.” Pure talent or background are not enough to make someone successful. What is needed is the crucible of hours and hours of practice.

Gladwell cites several examples in his book of how the 10,000 Hour Rule applies to success. He cites a lot of examples, but The Beatles were the one that intrigued me the most. The Beatles were a struggling high school rock band that had already been together for three years in 1960 when they were invited to play in Hamburg, Germany, where the club scene was very different and more demanding. John Lennon described the difference Hamburg made for the band: “In Liverpool, we’d only done one hour sessions, and we’d just do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing.”

Eight hours a night, seven days a week. By the time the Beatles had their first real commercial success in 1964, they had performed live an estimated 1200 times. Most bands don’t perform 1200 times in their whole careers. Phillip Norman, the band’s biographer, said this: “They were no good onstage when they went there and they were very good when they came back…They weren’t disciplined onstage at all before that. But when they came back they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.”

It took Mozart twenty years of composing before he produced his greatest work. It took Bobby Fisher ten years to become a chess grandmaster. Bill Gates programmed computers virtually nonstop for seven consecutive years as a high school and college student. What’s it take to be truly great at something? About 10,000 hours, says Gladwell.

We don’t know exactly how long Moses was in the desert of Midian—“a long period” says Exodus 2:23. Ten years? Twenty years? Forty years? Certainly, 10,000 hours or more that Moses spent tending his father in law’s flocks out there in the Sinai desert. 10,000 hours of walking, shepherding and…listening.

The desert is a constant theme throughout the Bible as the place of waiting, preparation and practice. Moses is in the desert before God calls him, the people of Israel will wander in the desert for 40 years before entering the promised land, God’s prophets will all come out of the desert. Even Jesus will spend 40 days in the desert after his baptism—and that after spending 30 years in obscurity before beginning his public ministry.

We’re so used to wanting instant success—get rich quick, move up the ladder. We celebrate athletes and celebrities who achieve quick success at a young age but then are stunned when they crash and burn as quickly. The Bible’s view of success is far more patient. Almost everyone we’ve read about so far would fit the definition of a late bloomer—Abraham was 75 when God called him, Jacob was already and adult. According to some Jewish tradition, Moses may have been as old as 40 when he went into the desert. Biblically speaking, God seems to favor those who have put in some time living and listening, which should be good news to some of us late bloomers!

It was those long hours of silence and solitude that I believe enabled Moses to hear God’s call. He observes a burning bush and goes to investigate. He notices something out of the ordinary because he has spent the time being familiar with the desert. Someone asked me during Bible study why God doesn’t speak to us in the way that he spoke to Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Moses. Well, maybe God does—it’s just that we’re not listening, we’re not looking. We are so bombarded with other messages and calls day after day, so busy doing other things that we don’t put the time in that is necessary to really listen for God.

If we want to experience burning bushes, we have to be willing to practice the presence of God. The more we practice the daily disciplines of solitude, silence, prayer, and study the more we will begin to understand and to live as disciples. Success in God’s eyes involves careful attention and practice in our relationship to God. That’s one of the reasons we’re undertaking this series—to give you intentional time to practice with God’s Word. Don’t worry if you’re a late bloomer—God seems to prefer them!

We know that Moses struggles with his call. He is fearful, lacks confidence, is contentious. But ultimately, Moses is faithful and goes where God leads him. When he stands before Pharaoh, he does so as one who has been uniquely prepared for this moment. He can speak to Pharaoh and speak for God and God’s people because he has been nurtured to this role and because he has put in those long hours of practice.

I believe, too, that there is a God Factor in Moses’ success and in our own. Each of us is uniquely equipped with a family background, a set of natural gifts, an environment, and opportunities to practice. I think God can use all of those, even our bad experiences, when he calls us. But what we have to remember is that when God calls us it isn’t generally about us. We have a tendency to think so individually—that God has a purpose for my life. But the reality is that God has a purpose for whole of creation and our purpose is always found within that larger purpose of God. My personal success as a pastor, or your success as a business person or homemaker or teacher or whatever, is no success at all unless it contributes to the success of God’s Kingdom. Moses had to get the idea that it was not about him and his own strengths and shortcomings, but about God and God’s ability to use our success to further his own.

This is a great story for doing some personal reflection. Who has brought you to this point in your life? What are the abundant advantages you bring to the table? Some of you might have to think creatively about that, but they are there. How are you practicing the presence of God right now and how can you do it better? And, lastly, what are the burning bushes out there that you may be walking past every day? How might your preparation and God’s call intersect to put you in a place of success for God’s Kingdom?

BONUS Sermon -- Joseph: Living with 50:20 Vision

When I read the story of Joseph in Genesis, I think of it as a scar story – the story of a young man’s woundedness and recovery, but even more so a story of hope.

The book of Genesis takes 13 chapters to tell his story. We read for you the beginning and the end of it this morning, but here’s the Reader’s Digest version:

You’ll recall from last week that Jacob had 12 sons with 4 different wives – where we get the 12 tribes of Israel. Joseph was the first son born to Rachel, Jacob’s favorite – the one for whom he had labored for 14 years to receive her hand in marriage. Consequently, Joseph is Jacob’s favorite son among all the sons. So pleased is Jacob that he makes Joseph a many-colored coat with long sleeves (indicates that he wasn’t really expected to work!).

Joseph’s brothers are jealous, of course. Add to that the fact that Joseph has dreams about his brothers bowing down to him and you can see the sibling rivalry really get going. When Joseph goes out to check up on his brothers at his father’s request, they finally decide to get rid of him – they strip him of his garment, throw him in a cistern, and eventually sell him into slavery. They tell their father that he was eaten by a predator, presenting him the coat smeared with goat’s blood (this was the time before CSI and DNA, of course).

Joseph is brought as a slave to Egypt, sold to a man named Potiphar. After a while, though, Potiphar saw what a good servant Joseph had become and eventually put him in charge of the household. Genesis makes it clear that Joseph is successful—even getting a new robe. By now, Joseph was growing into a handsome man and attracted the attention of Potiphar’s wife, who secretly propositions Joseph to engage in an affair with her. When he refuses on moral grounds, however, she become furious and falsely accuses him of raping her, and has him thrown into prison.

There he languishes for years in incarceration, but even in the deep, dark dungeon he makes a favorable impression on the prison warden, who puts him in charge of the other prisoners, interpreting their dreams and then, after a long time, is called to interpret the dreams of the Pharoah, the ruler of all of Egypt. When Joseph interprets Pharoah’s dreams, preparing the land for a great famine to come, Pharoah makes him prime minister in charge of social and economic affairs, managing the resources of the empire. Once again, he is given a tunic with long sleeves…

When the famine strikes it hits hard in Joseph’s homeland of Canaan, where his father and brothers still reside. They hear that there is grain stored up in Egypt, so they decide to go down and buy some grain, not knowing who it was they would be buying it from!

Imagine Joseph now standing over his brothers – scarred for life by what they had done to him. He has every right to play the victim – he is one, after all and we’d expect him to want some payback. And we’d expect that because we live in a culture of victimhood. (Reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon: First panel Calvin says, “Nothing I do is my fault. My family is dysfunctional and my parents won’t empower me. Consequently, I’m not self-actualized. My behavior is addictive, functioning in a disease process of codependency. I need holistic healing and wellness before I’ll accept any responsibility for my actions. I love the culture of victimhood!” To which Hobbes replies: “One of us needs to stick his head in a bucket of ice water!)

But Joseph refuses to give in to victimhood. He does not view his physical and emotional scars as reason for despair or revenge. He sees them, incredibly, as signs of God’s providence.

Look at how Joseph points to his scars in Genesis 45:1-8, the account of the reunion with his brothers:

“Joseph couldn’t hold himself in any longer, keeping up a front before all his attendants. He cried out, “Leave! Clear out—everyone leave!” So there was no one with Joseph when he identified himself to his brothers. But his sobbing was so violent that the Egyptians couldn’t help but hear him. The news was soon reported to Pharaoh’s palace.

Joseph spoke to his brothers: “I am Joseph. Is my father really still alive?” But his brothers couldn’t say a word. They were terrified - speechless—they couldn’t believe what they were hearing and seeing.
“Come closer to me,” Joseph said to his brothers. They came closer. “I am Joseph your brother whom you sold into Egypt. But don’t feel badly, don’t blame yourselves for selling me. God was behind it. God sent me here ahead of you to save lives. There has been a famine in the land now for two years; the famine will continue for five more years—neither plowing nor harvesting. God sent me on ahead to pave the way and make sure there was a remnant in the land, to save your lives in an amazing act of deliverance. So you see, it wasn’t you who sent me here but God.”

Wow. Here is Joseph, looking back at the events of his life with a new vision – the scars of pain, rejection, and separation are, for him, only part of the story. In Genesis 50:20, he sums it up: “You intended to harm, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”  David Seamands, one of my professors at Asbury, called this 50:20 vision…Genesis 50:20 vision. What the world, the human plan, the human scheme planned as an evil, self-serving act – God took and used for good, preserving life!

One of the persistent puzzles of the human experience is how we deal with the evil in our world. As humans in a fallen world, we seem to live lives of constant jeopardy – vulnerable to a wide range of evil – sickness, crime, destruction of families, oppression – you know them all because you live them every day. It’s quite a legitimate question to ask or even cry out, “Where is God in all this?”
Joseph’s 50:20 vision tells us that despite all evidence to the contrary, God is at work. God is making things good despite the evil.

Does this mean that every tragedy we experience has a silver lining? That all evil is really good, and that all our suffering is somehow being orchestrated by God?

Not at all.

The world is full of senseless violence, horrifying hatred and a whole range of actions and attitudes that attempt to thwart the will of God. 

It would be bad theology to assert that the Lord is orchestrating all this evil, as the tension of life builds toward some grand and glorious ending. But one thing that both the Old and the New Testaments teach us is that God has the power to transform human evil into divine good.

Notice that the end of Genesis has the same message as the beginning. In Genesis 1, God creates the universe, the earth, and us and calls it all “good”. By chapter 3, humans have rejected God’s goodness – but despite all human efforts to the contrary, God’s intention for good overcomes. He used the slavery of Joseph to save a family, and he transformed the death of Jesus into the salvation of the world. Even the apostle Paul, languishing in prison, writes to the Romans “For we know that all things work together for good to them that love God and are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:20)
Never should we ask for a scar to be removed. Joseph didn't, Jesus didn't, and neither should we. But God can create a life in which our wound is transformed into something good, and we are propelled toward new and abundant life.

That’s 50:20 vision. How do we get it?

In his classic book The Wounded Healer, Henri Nouwen reflects on what it means to minister in a hurting and alienated society. He recommends prayer, not as a "decoration of life," but as the breath of human existence. A Christian community is a healing community, says Nouwen, not because wounds are cured and pains are alleviated, but because wounds and pains become openings or occasions for a new vision – 50:20 vision.

How about you? What’s your vision? Take a look at your scars: physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual. How can they be openings or occasions for new visions? Joseph looked at the scar of his sale into slavery, and saw that God had a saving plan for his life. Perhaps some abuse you have suffered will enable you to serve people who have been abused; maybe some hurt you have endured will equip you to ease the pain of another; it could be that some loss you have experienced will put you in a powerful position to assist those who are grieving.

We can find meaning in our scars. As we gather here the week before Christmas, we celebrate the coming of the baby in the manger, but we look ahead, too, to the reality of the Cross and the Resurrection. We remember that when Jesus came out of the tomb, he still had scars. Phillip Yancey, in his book The Jesus I Never Knew explains:

Presumably [Jesus] could have had any resurrected body he wanted, and yet he chose one identifiable mainly by scars that could be seen and touched. Why?

I believe the story of Easter would be incomplete without those scars on the hands, the feet, and the side of Jesus. When human beings fantasize, we dream of pearly straight teeth and wrinkle-free skin and sexy ideal shapes. We dream of an unnatural state: the perfect body. But for Jesus, being confined in a skeleton and human skin WAS the unnatural state. The scars are, to him, an emblem of life on our planet, a permanent reminder of those days of confinement and suffering.

I take hope in Jesus' scars. From the perspective of heaven, they represent the most horrible event that has ever happened in the history of the universe - the crucifixion - Easter turned into a memory. Because of Easter, I can hope that the tears we shed, the blows we receive, the emotional pain, the heartache over lost friends and loved ones, all these will become memories, like Jesus' scars. Scars never completely go away, but neither do they hurt any longer.

The story of Genesis is that God is always working for good despite human efforts to the contrary. God has stuck with us, and seeks to work in and through us. No matter what we are facing, we can be sure that somehow, someway, God is still working for good.

That’s 50:20 vision!

Soul Struggles: Genesis 28-50

We continue our series this week with one of the more interesting, entertaining, and compelling stories of the Old Testament. We’ve seen the sin of Adam and Eve, the faithfulness of Noah, the covenant promise to Abraham, and the promised child Isaac. We come now to Jacob.

Jacob’s story opens with the episode we read earlier about him and his brother Esau. Even though they were twins, Esau was the firstborn and by rights would receive the full inheritance of their father Isaac. Esau is a hunter and Jacob more of a farmer. Esau is also more impulsive, strong, a “man’s man.” Jacob knew his older brother’s weakness and exploited it—extorting the birthright from Esau in exchange for some stew. When it came time for Isaac to deliver the blessing to his oldest son, Jacob and his mother, Rebekah, conspired to seal the deal by having Jacob pretend to be the hairier Esau in front of their blind father. Esau comes in from hunting to get his blessing, but discovers that Jacob has cheated him out of it. The hunter resolves to kill Jacob after their father passes away.

So, Jacob runs for his life. He goes back to the ancestral home in Paddam-Aram to live with his uncle Laban, and on the way he has a dream about a stairway to heaven with angels ascending and descending (Genesis 28). Dreams will play a big part in the rest of Genesis as the ancients believed that God communicated through dreams (and still does). In Jacob’s dream, God repeats to him the promise of Abraham—the promise of land and descendants—the promise that Jacob now carries. It is curious, isn’t it, that God would offer such an amazing vision to one who already has a bad reputation!

Now, in contrast to Abraham, who generally took God at his word, notice Jacob’s response to the dream (28:20) – “If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God.” In other words, Jacob says, “God, show me what you got.” Instead of God testing Jacob, like Abraham, Jacob decides to put God to the test.

Jacob goes back to his family’s ancestral home and there meets Rachel who he wants to make his wife. Rachel is Jacob’s cousin on his mother’s side—the daughter of his uncle Laban, who’s a bit of a schemer himself. Laban agrees to the marriage but only if Jacob will work for him for seven years. Jacob does so, and finally has his first night with his beloved—only to wake up in the morning and discover that he hadn’t slept with Rachel but with her older sister, Leah (how this happened, well, it has something to do with veils and heavy drinking). Jacob, the deceiver, had been deceived. He confronts Laban, who agrees to finally give him Rachel, but only if he’ll promise to work another seven years for her.

Jacob now has two wives who are sisters and this works out badly. Leah, who is “unloved,” has seven children by Jacob—Rachel has none. She is barren, like Rebekah and Sarah before her. She blames Jacob (“Give me children or I’ll die!”) and enters into a contest with Leah by having her servant girl sleep with Jacob to produce children for her. She eventually does bear a child, Joseph, who we’ll talk about next week.

That’s just a taste of the story. There’s no soap opera that can compare with this! Hard to imagine what the film adaptation would look like. There is an interesting novel about all this, though. Anita Diamant’s “The Red Tent” is a fascinating biblical fiction that puts a different spin on the story. I’d recommend it as a good read, though it takes a lot of license with the biblical text.

Eventually, Jacob is so good at tending the flocks that becomes very prosperous in comparison to his uncle, and God calls Jacob to go back home to Canaan and the land of his father Isaac and grandfather Abraham. In returning, Jacob knows that he will have to confront his brother Esau—the one whom he had wronged so terribly. So afraid is Jacob that he sends his whole family ahead of him, along with a whole caravan of gifts, to try and “soften up” his older brother (Honey, you go talk to him first, ‘kay?)

Now, here in the middle of the night by the ford of the Jabbok River, Jacob instantly finds himself in a wrestling match. The text calls the unexpected opponent a “man,” but when the nocturnal brawl ended, Jacob said he had “seen God face to face.” Whomever Jacob struggled with, Jacob thought he’d gone 15 rounds with God.

Certainly in a contest between a mortal and an immortal, God is the heavyweight favorite. But in this night-long struggle, we find no indication that God could wipe up the ground with Jacob at any given moment. Rather, God seems to limit his power so that the fight is a fair one, and Jacob holds his own. He isn’t whipping the celestial combatant, but he’s not embarrassing himself either.

As dawn breaks, this mysterious adversary knocks Jacob’s hip out of joint and insists that Jacob let him go. But Jacob refuses — unless this God-man will bless him. Jacob needs the assurance that he is the one to carry the promise because when he crosses that river the next day he could be facing certain death.

But rather than simply bless Jacob, the antagonist gives Jacob a new name, Israel, “the one who strives with God.”

Notice what the name implies. It’s the name for a whole nation—a people who would wrestle with God and with itself over the whole issue of covenant. From Jacob onward, Israel would engage in a constant battle against the desire to be like everyone else. They would struggle, suffer, wrestle, even limp about in their efforts to follow God’s leading. But God wouldn’t let them go, even as Jacob wouldn’t let God leave without blessing him.

Having received his own new name, Jacob asks his opponent for his name. This was no small request. Jacob wants to understand the mystery of heaven and earth. You may recall that God’s “name” was so holy that no one in ancient Israel would dare speak it (hence the commandment, “Do not take the Lord’s name in vain”). There was also a sense that if you knew a deity’s name, you could somehow manipulate that deity (like an incantation). But the God of Israel will not be so manipulated.

So the stranger will not give up that name. The opponent blesses Jacob, but will not give Jacob all that Jacob seeks. Some things have changed, but others will remain as unsettled as they were before the match began.

As the sun comes up, the stranger disappears, and Jacob limps away with less than he sought from the all-night battle. He survived seeing God face to face, and received a blessing, but he did not get God’s name.

Interesting that we read this story on Super Bowl Sunday. We’re a culture that’s so driven by the difference between winners and losers. Today, for example, one team will leave the field triumphant, with confetti flowing down, trophy in hand, official hats and t-shirts on them. One team will make its mark in NFL history and be remembered forever as the victors. The other team….will be the Arizona Cardinals.

But the Bible doesn’t portray the winner and loser in this wrestling match between Jacob and God as having won an ultimate victory. Jacob is wounded, sore , but not a sore loser, for he has received more than he ever expected. He is no longer merely Jacob, the deceiver; he is now Israel, the one who strives with God.

While on a literal level this whole story is strange to us, it is not that difficult to relate to when we plug in our own experiences. How many of us have had a sleepless night struggling with our conscience or trying to justify ourselves for some hurt we inflicted? How many of us have suspected God was calling us to something we weren’t keen on and found sleep elusive while we tried to rationalize the whole business away? And how many of us have sought God’s blessing, and been given it, but left without a clear sense of what to do next?

That leaves us with an interesting theme - God the Attacker. Even the disquieting picture of God as the attacker isn’t that hard to comprehend. Haven’t we sometimes experienced God as the one who needles us to change, who provokes us to try harder, who bullies his way through our defenses to demand our commitment, who hounds us to surrender to him? This is no namby-pamby God who sits quietly on the sidelines of life waiting for us to notice him. When it suits his purposes, God is an in-our-face figure who confronts us through our conscience, through other people, through Scripture, through worship, through gut-wrenching situations or through other means to pressure us to deal with him. In those times, it is not that we cannot find God; it’s that we cannot get him off our back.

It’s an interesting irony of scripture that God doesn’t just attack those who are coming against him. In many cases, the people whom God “attacks” are not enemies of God. Rather they are people who were either actively attempting to do God’s will or who are at least expected to play a crucial role in passing on the divine covenant.

But the fact that God takes action against those who are obediently loyal to him suggests that there is a tough-love component to God’s compassion. Perhaps one aspect of God’s love is like that of a parent who puts obstacles in the way of an obedient child to make the child learn the hard but necessary lessons that enable movement toward maturity. Or, as the writer of Proverbs puts it, “for the Lord reproves the one he loves” (Proverbs 3:12).

A similar dynamic must have been going on during Vince Lombardi’s reign with the Green Bay Packers. Sports writers noted that one particular player seemed most often the object of Lombardi’s anger. A Green Bay pastor had a team member in his congregation and asked him if the sports writers were right. “Definitely,” said the player-parishioner. “He’s Coach Lombardi’s favorite.”

We have to remember, too, that God’s own son was not immune from wrestling with God. Jesus wrestled with his call and wrestled with those who would oppose his message of grace. Jesus had, in fact, taken on the role of Israel in his own person and showed the way out the other side—what it means to triumph, even over the grave.

Jacob’s glory in this dusk-to-dawn duel is not that he went looking for trouble, but rather that when it found him, when he was faced with the most formidable of foes possible, he stayed with the struggle until he received God’s blessing.

And that’s where our glory comes in, too. When God assails us with guilt or doubt or menaces our comfort with an unwanted challenge, we always have the option to deny the reality of the experience, to attribute it to “crazy thoughts” or an over active imagination. Better than denial, however, is to go on the mat with God and stay in the struggle until we have wrung from the Divine Adversary/Lover the blessing he wanted us to have all along.

The fourth-century church father St. Augustine gives us one flavor of that experience when he tells of the brutality of God’s call. Augustine says that God attacked him through his senses:

You called and shouted and burst my deafness. You flashed, shone, scattered my blindness. You breathed odors, and I drew in breath and panted for you. I tasted, and hungered and thirsted. You touched me and I burned for your peace.

For another flavor, consider how one 21st-century man describes his call into the ministry. He had been feeling the quiet tug of God for quite some time, but he wasn’t interested. Then, he says, “God started to shout at me.” It seemed that he could hardly get through a day without something in his usual routine suddenly taking on new confrontational meaning — and what had been a gentle “Please respond” became a provocative “Well, what are you going to do about this?” The man says that when he finally yielded, he was blessed with great peace and joy.

We might say that differently. Some might discuss this in terms of perspective. When we encounter God, we undergo a perspective change, an attitude adjustment. Jacob could’ve said, “Well, I got whupped.” Or he could say, “Hey, I got a new name.”

It’s clear from the text, too, that Jacob/Israel had learned from his mistakes. He came clean and threw himself at the mercy of his brother Esau…fully expecting to be rejected at best or killed at worst. Instead, when Esau sees his brother coming, the older brother “ran to meet Jacob and embraced him; he threw his arms around his neck and kissed him. And they wept together” (Genesis 33:4). The struggle had a pay-off. From pain often comes reconciliation—with God and with each other.

God is in the business of perspective change. We encounter God and we’re a different person, with a different name. We might have asked for this, but we got that. We might not have gained what we wanted, but we got what God wanted for us.

We might be sore losers in all of this. No struggle is pleasant. Our pride may be wounded, our bodies may be tired, our minds may be abuzz with new possibilities.

But when we stay with the struggle, we can come out the other side, like Jacob, with  a new name — “one who strives with God.”

A lot of people expect faith to yield easy answers…to be a panacea against problems. The truth is that following God is often more like a wrestling match than a walk in the park. If you’re going to follow, expect there to be some measure of struggle.

And if you’re struggling now, know that there’s a purpose to that wrestling. Jacob shows us that often it’s the only way we can truly experience the blessings God has in store for us.

See, if you wrestle with God…there’s no such thing as a sore loser!

The rest of Jacob/Israel’s story in Genesis is bound up in the Joseph story, which is ends the book of Genesis and explains the Israelite sojourn into Egypt. Time doesn’t permit us to go into that story in depth here in worship, but I’ve posted an extra “bonus” sermon just on Joseph on my blog, so make sure you check that out.